With less than a week left in office, the Trump administration is attempting a "backdoor maneuver" to bring immigration changes facing legal challenges back to the forefront, Stef W. Kight and Jonathan Swan report in Axios. How? By reissuing them through the new acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, Pete Gaynor.

Gaynor, who previously served as administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, issued a memo empowering former acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf — who "multiple federal judges have found … was likely unlawfully appointed" but remains as DHS undersecretary — to "sign and ratify agency regulations."

The move has potential consequences for proposed visa fee hikes, the fate of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and other immigration moves that have been blocked, Kight and Swan explain. However, they write, while Trump is making a last-ditch attempt to protect his immigration actions, President-elect Biden "will have other ways to undo them."

Welcome to Thursday’s edition of Noorani’s Notes. If you have a story to share from your own community, please send it to me at [email protected].

ICE CHANGES — Jonathan Fahey, the acting leader of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has resigned just two weeks after starting with no explanation regarding his departure — the latest "in a long line of resignations at ICE during the Trump administration" that symbolize the agency’s constant upheaval under Trump, reports Hamed Aleaziz at BuzzFeed News. "We haven’t been bothering to learn the names of the political appointees for months now, anticipating that they will all be short-term," said an anonymous ICE official, adding that the constant turnover hasn’t stopped the administration from drastically transforming immigration enforcement: "Yet somehow the barrage of agency rule-making and then injunctions by the courts continue. The revolving door of figureheads doesn’t appear to have impeded those actually implementing the changes much."

MEXICO — President-elect Biden is under pressure to focus on immigration reform in his first 100 days in office — and a successful approach will require collaboration with Mexico, León Krauze writes in an opinion piece for The Washington Post. Citing the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, Krauze implores Biden to "end the [Trump administration’s ‘Remain In Mexico’ policy] and work with Mexico to reverse its pernicious consequences," emphasizing the need for a more robust, humane asylum system. ICYMI: I chatted with León on "Only in America" just before the 2018 midterm elections about our democracy and the future for immigrants in America.

"CIVILITY ALWAYS PREVAILS" – In Washington, D.C., members of the National Guard are bivouacking at the Capitol and deploying across the city in anticipation of further attacks by right-wing extremists. For Renier Suárez, who came to the U.S. from Cuba two decades ago, the continued threat of violence after last week’s storming of the Capitol has been particularly jarring, Olivia P. Tallet reports for the Houston Chronicle. "I couldn’t believe my eyes … This is something that I have only seen in Latin America," Suárez told the Chronicle. For him, "America opened the doors of an advanced democracy where civility always prevails, as opposed to the authoritarianism he said he lived under in Fidel Castro’s government in the Caribbean island." While recent events at the Capitol have been painful for our nation, I believe our democracy will survive because of generations of Americans who have fought and died for our nation, the millions of Americans who exercise their rights in our democratic society, and the millions of immigrants and refugees who have strengthened our democracy.

CENSUS CUTS TIES — The Trump administration’s effort to alter the way undocumented immigrants are counted in the census has officially ceased, Hansi Lo Wang reports for NPR. The team working on the effort was instructed to "stand down and cease their work immediately" earlier this week, halting the production of a Trump-ordered "state-by-state count of unauthorized immigrants that would have been used to alter a key set of census numbers." Wang notes that it is still unclear what the Trump administration will do with the data collected prior to the halt in production. As the Forum has noted and as I’ve said before, any efforts to not count or undercount undocumented immigrants could hurt traditionally red states.

GOOGLE ON BOARD — In a show of support for immigration reform, Google has pledged to award a quarter of a million dollars to United We Dream to offset the costs of 500 DACA applications, Richard Nieva reports for CNET. "We know this is only a temporary solution," said Kent Walker, Google's senior vice president of global affairs, via a blog post. "We need legislation that not only protects Dreamers but also delivers other much-needed reforms." As Paresh Dave notes in Reuters, the move comes as Google and other large U.S. employers transition from working with an administration that repeatedly restricted companies’ ability to hire foreign-born workers to one that promises to work "immediately" with Congress on immigration legislation.  

Thanks for reading,

Ali